Agile Scout » Ed Hill

Why Your Sales Team Doesn’t Use Marketing Automation Leads from the Marketing Team

Ed Hill — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:15:45 +0000

Marketing automation software, such as Marketo and Pardot, have simplified tracking repeat web visitors, lead scoring and lead nurturing with email drip campaigns. While tracking and nurturing web visitors until they have enough information to become viable sales leads is easier, one problem remains. Without sales team and marketing team coordination, the type of leads delivered may not meet the sales team’s needs.

Last week I spoke with a field sales executive for an Atlanta software company, at an anonymous coffee shop. Sales Executive X has sold to major clients and he’s led teams of sales people. He relates that, “There are often times when the marketing team launches marketing initiatives. They send out materials to clients. Sales people then realize they’ve never heard of a marketing announcement, when clients start asking them questions that they’re not prepared to answer. Sometimes there is a disconnect between marketing and sales department within the same company”.

The obvious cure for these miscommunications is for the marketing team leaders and sales team leaders to communicate with each other on a quarterly or even monthly basis. In sales organizations where the salespeople are often under pressure to run as hard to land a $2,500 client as a $250,000 client, salespeople often have no time to research what the marketing department is currently promoting to potential customers. The marketing team can solve this problem by updating the sales team with every new issue of collateral or each new online initiative.

Marketing action is often not helping sales unless they are communicating with each other to set priorities. It is important for salespeople to be in touch with the product managers and research and development team. Occasionally, leaders will bring the sales team and marketing team together for discussion, but the best result comes from meeting on a regular time table.

For example, one company that Sales Executive X worked with decided to reward salespeople who shared customer insights with the marketing department with a $500 incentive. This initiative was mentioned once in 2004 and never mentioned again.

How much better would it be to have these meetings and solicit customer insights on a quarterly basis. But X cautions that, “There is a real danger that these meetings can turn into bitch sessions on past occasions where marketing and sales did not communicate”. It’s better if both teams assume that the other team has positive intentions. The most productive approach will be to use a questioning method to learn about problem points and analyze why they are happening.

There’s is tremendous value in bringing understanding between sales and marketing teams. Sales Executive X insisted that, “If there is a salesperson who consistently provides innovative product suggestions to the marketing and product design team, perhaps that person would serve a greater good in the organization being the liaison between customers and product design and marketing”.

By the same token, marketing teams can regularly update sales teams right before they launch a new marketing campaign. The marketing team can take an active role in approaching the sales team to learn the true criteria for a desirable sales lead. Often, sales calls can be more fruitful if the marketing team can send new leads with detailed information about the customer and their readiness to buy. You can make a huge difference in your organization by bridging this information gap.

When was the last time that your sales team landed a lead from the marketing process? Does your marketing team understand the sort of customers that your field sales people really want and need? Share your stories with us.

Why Your Sales Team Doesn’t Use Marketing Automation Leads from the Marketing Team

Use Social Marketing and Search to Promote Your Business

Ed Hill — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:15:28 +0000

Social Marketing and Search for Business.

Using Social Media and Search Marketing for Your Business
Search Marketer Ed Hill Interviews Joe Koufman on Using Social Media and Search Marketing
Transcript:
First, let’s examine how Google has adapted to the rising value of social media.
We know that social media brings three main benefits to your business:
Your business exposure and branding will increase.
Social media platforms will become a new source of added web traffic to your business web site. Your analytics may show up to 10% of your web traffic coming from social sites.
The marketing insights you gain from social listening and answering customer service questions are powerful. Here’s your chance to improve your products and correct problem that are hurting your brand image.
2007
As early as 2007 Google began to include blogs on the first page of search results, this was the first step in bringing social media into search results.
2009
The converging of social and search accelerated. Google started adding Real Time Social Media to Search Results. This means that if you add a blog post, tweet or news story to the web, it can show up in Google search within 15 to 20 minutes.
2010
Social media greatly increased the volume of new information coming into the web. To keep up, the Google Caffeine update increased the speed of indexing. Now new blog posts, social posts and news items would be indexed more quickly to guarantee that your search queries will get fresh results.
2011
The Google Plus one button was launched followed by the Google Plus social network. This helped solve a major problem in search. Before social media, you never knew if a search result would be a cleverly optimized page or a high quality page that was the real answer to your search question. By having people like and PLUS ONE items, the search engines could now decide the best search results based partly on people’s votes.
Google Freshness update increases volume of recent news and trending social results in search results
Social media listening and community building is time consuming. For the 48% of business with sales from social media, social media has proved it’s worth. You may not get direct sales like you do from pay per click or SEO landing pages, but social media does help your branding, customer service and collaboration with customers.
If 57% of businesses in the survey acquired customers through blogging, you must build a business blog with posts 3-5 days a week. Your business blog can also serve as a hub for all of your social media content.
Now, let’s take a closer look at why social media is valuable to you as a marketer.
If 40-48% of businesses are getting sales from social media, the next question is: Do your customers favor certain blogs or web discussion forums? Do they just post on major social media platforms, like Facebook or do they hang out on specialized boards on Pinterest? Find out where your customers post messages, before investing the time and effort to build your social community.
When 40% of viewers purchase after seeing a video, you need two things. It just makes sense to place product demonstration videos on your web site and customer-focused, problem solving videos on social media platforms.
The social web allows users to widely share reviews of bad products. If you’re consistently getting quality complaints, the best fix is to correct your products or service. When 68% of users write product reviews, good quality products will also be rewarded in the search engines. Make it easy for customers to write product reviews on your ecommerce site. The benefits can be long lasting.
When 50% of customers are combining social and search while researching products, your business MUST be visible in both social and search. Combine a good SEO presence on the web, plus social community building so users will share your content and recommend your products to others.
I spoke with Joe Koufman SVP of Sales at Engauge Digital to find out how social builds the value of search
JOE KOUFMAN: If you think about what the search engines are trying try to accomplish, they’re trying to answer the question that you have. You go to the search engines with a question, you ask the question, and Google or Bing is trying to answer that question that you’ve posed. People are also going to social to ask questions and have those questions answered.
If I’m trying to consider what my next digital camera purchase might be or cell phone or car, often I’ll go to my social network and ask them the question. And then, who do you trust more, the company giving you the answer about why their car is the best or your friends who have had experience with that same car manufacturer?
So, to me social is a way that you can use a lot of different tools, but from a customer service standpoint answering one customer’s question through social and then having that answer indexed through search, you may be answering thousands of other people’s questions. From a product development standpoint, listening, social listening and trying to hear about what people are talking about your product or your category and then taking that and developing products that meet their needs.
Again with search, you can get scale, you can get mass. So, posting one tweet, posting one video on Youtube, posting on info graphic that you put on Pintrest or on Flicker or somewhere else. You have the ability now to disseminate that content so that it can be found by a larger, more diverse set of people who are potential consumers, who can give you ideas about the new products, who could potentially purchase your products, who can help come to your defense if you’re having a PR crisis of some kind.
So to me, the mix of social and search is really powerful because it brings scale to a conversation that you’re having in social.
Please share this video with your friends on Twitter.

Use Social Marketing and Search to Promote Your Business

Combine Content, SEO and Social Media to Grow Your Web Traffic

Ed Hill — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:15:37 +0000

In the last 2 years Google has changed the weight of the factors that put your web pages on the first page of search result listings. This is causing a flood of articles on the Death of SEO. The most useful is Ken Krogue’s article in Forbe’s Magazine. SEO hasn’t died, it’s just gotten more complicated. Building web or blog content must meet five needs:

Meet user needs and answer user questions
Include search optimization principles to make your content easy to find on the web or in social platforms
Use social media methods to share your content and build your relationship with customers
Build significant amounts of content over time
Publish fresh content 3-5 times per week

Google Changes Everything

It started with Google penalizing Overstock.com for links from edu educational domains and penalizing JC Penney for buying links in 2011. The Wall Street Journal and most online marketing forums took notice.

SEO may look simple to people outside of the corporate marketing department. Leaders who allocate the resources and budget for SEO meed to realize what has happened in the last two years. The Google Penguin update punished link building schemes and several Google Panda updates forced out web sites with thin content, more ads than content, weak user metrics or a poor user experience.

The most interesting part of the Panda update is Google’s use of user metrics like time on page and bounce rate to reward sites where users stay longer to read pages with useful information. There’s no way to game this metric. Your best method to solve this need is to use social listening tools to find and answer questions and problems that your readers express in comments, forums and social media. Think long term and plan on building 100-300 pages of content, with each page focusing on a single keyword phrase that you discovered in your social listening. In the graph, you can see that traffic increases at a faster pace as you reach 150 to 200 pages of content in your blog or web site. ( Based on Hubspot.com research data.)

Will your Blog Grow Traffic or Wither Away?

Here’s how to avoid SEO mistakes and gain the first page of Google search rankings to grow your web traffic.

Only spend 20% of your effort on fixing existing blog or web pages with SEO enhancements. Correcting basic SEO and technical errors on old web page or blog content is a good start, but you should put more effort into building and optimizing many new content pages that help your users. The correlation between more content and more traffic is compelling.
Go beyond just building the search engine rank of your 20 top converting key words. Instead focus on building the content footprint of your site and become a trusted source of information in your niche. Check your analytics and find what keywords actually draw users to your web site. There will be many more than 20 keywords. Your users are telling you what they really want to read on your site. Are you listening to what users say through your analytics or through problems and questions they pose through social media? If you optimize search for 200+ long tail keywords, your traffic will grow.
Customers don’t want your products, as much as they want a solution to their problem. You built research based user persona’s that tell you who your customers are, didn’t you? If you have 7 types of customers with different needs, why would you drive them to 4 product pages? You should have multiple offers, spread across 20 to 50 landing pages that solve user problems and meet their needs at different parts of the buying cycle.
When Facebook created the LIKE button, they accidentally solved one of Google’s main search quality problems. Even with the Google algorithm to rank each web page using over 200 factors, users could never be sure if they would click through to a great page that solved their need or a slick sales page. Google now includes Shares of your content, Google+ and other social media signals that tell the search engines how humans rank your content. Listening to your customers and engaging them in social media discussions builds your brand, builds trust and improves your visibility to search engines.
The first step before creating content is reading forums, blogs and social sites where your users hang out. What do users like or dislike about your product or service? You should be learning the problems that users face and help solve these problems. Let users get involved with your product through user generated content, games, surveys or contests. This will build trust with customers who will be happy to share your content with others. When enthusiastic customers share their great experience with their social media friends, you won’t need to buy fake artificial links.
Increase the usability and decrease the bounce rate of web pages to gain search rank. Almost every landing page or blog post should have images or photos to increase user involvement. Replace your one size fits all videos with short videos that demonstrate some specific aspect of your product, answer user questions or involve users in your product story.

Have you noticed increased web traffic as your consulting or marketing blog and site grow? Are you struggling with building more content? Tell us about it in comments.

Combine Content, SEO and Social Media to Grow Your Web Traffic

Promote Your Blog with Google Plus

Ed Hill — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:15:20 +0000

Google’s Search Plus is an opportunity to increase the visibility of your blog in search results using some simple search methods. Google has been including Google Search Plus results in your search results since January 2012. This modifies Google’s search algorithm to gain a human review of the search results. You gain visibility if your blog content is commented, shared or liked in a social network like Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.

Since their birth in the late 1990’s, search engines have lacked a quality signal to decide if search results are really useful content or just some clever sales page devised to lure you in through a search engine. Google Search Plus adds ranking of the search results from people you know and from people you don’t know, so the quality of search results for your search queries should improve.

So how can you use Google Plus and and other social platforms to increase your visibility in the Google search results?

How to Optimize Your Blog with Google Plus

Your approach to influencing Google Search Plus will require;

Maintaining a Google Plus One page specifically linking to your blog or consulting web page content.
Build up a community in your Google Plus Circles that includes people who post content that is relevant.
You can affect the Google Search Plus results by placing your desired keywords into the Introduction, Employment, Education and Places lived section of your Google Plus profile. Placing topic keywords into your Google Plus profile helps Google search results, whether search users are logged in to Google or not logged in to Google. You’ll have to do the research to uncover the two or three keywords that accurately describe your specialty, in order to appear in the search results.
Google Search Plus also includes data from other major social networks. Distributing your content on other social networks will enhance your Google Search Results presence.
Google Search Plus returns search results based on your circles and activity on Google Plus. It’s important to expand the number of people in your circles. You should also use Plus+s, comments and shares with people in your circles.
Google Search Plus favors content that is easily shared across social networks. Having the Google +1 button visible on your content is crucial to Search Plus optimization. You’ll also want to place social share buttons for other social platforms like Facebook, Twitter or bookmarking sites like Reddit.

Promote Your Blog with Google Plus

How Do You Convert Social Media Data Into Marketing Insights?

Ed Hill — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:15:31 +0000

The most challenging aspect of social media data is making the connection from the data you have to actionable insights that will move the needle on your marketing results. Use these questions to find the seeds of marketing performance improvement in your social data:

The purpose of your social campaigns should guide you in the type of social data you want to track. It’s important to think this through carefully, BEFORE you launch your social campaign. Do you need to go beyond the basic metrics such as user counts and user sentiment? You need to gather baseline data before your campaign, so that you can compare the changes in data caused once your social campaign launches. You need to identify the metrics that really matter when gauging if your campaign is producing social user reactions or responses. You can also anticipate what you will change if your social campaign is ignored by users.

The first question is: What are your goals for your social marketing?

Branding
Building Awareness
Building the audience count for your social content
Increasing the sharing of your social content
Increasing links and traffic to your main web site
Countering negative messages from social users who are waging a jihad against your brand
Monitoring consumer sentiment about existing and new products
Monitoring consumer needs and problems to guide new product creation
New product launch
Building more responsive customer service

What does the data mean and what do the relationships represent? One of the major benefits of real-time social data and search analytics data is that you can rapidly adapt as consumers react to your social messages, products or content.

Think of each social product launch, or attempt to gain social user reactions or new social content calendar as a real time experiment. You can use the iterative social user data points to react to user needs and adapt your operational strategies. The ideal result would be operations practices that respond to the data and to have engagement with the data built into your processes.

Comparing the baseline social metrics data to the changes during your campaign can reveal sometimes surprising insights into what customers really care about. Don’t ignore data that shows that social users priorities are radically different from what you expected. This is exactly why social media is so valuable. The social users’ needs are more important than some predefined expectations. If the answers require dramatic changes to current business practices, how can you use the data to build the business case for your proposed changes? Is there any correlation between your social data insights and trends in your search traffic analytics data?

Use these questions as a framework for building social data that will guide you to actionable marketing insights.

How Do You Convert Social Media Data Into Marketing Insights?

Preventing Search Marketing Campaign Bottlenecks

Ed Hill — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:15:14 +0000

If you manage marketing for your blog or marketing for your company as part of a team, there are outside factors that affect your marketing. A solid and effective relationship with other members of your team is crucial. Sure, you can create great search marketing plans, but if they are not implemented quickly and correctly, your marketing will fizzle. I’ve seen these same stumbling blocks impede small companies with $15 million yearly sales and corporate giants with revenue in the billions. These stumbling blocks are not the quality of your SEO or your blogging. If you create a powerful blog post or effective landing page and then it never gets implemented on your web site, then no one will see it. Let’s consider some of these real world factors, within your own organization.

- Blogs may lack enough contributors to build sufficient weekly content
- Programmers or web designers may not implement your SEO changes quickly
- Executives in your organization may not allocate budget or resources for SEO or search marketing projects
- Project managers may delay SEO changes in the current development cycle, in favor of other web site programming

The best case will be having direct access to the website or blog to make content changes without burdening a developer or designer. For simply adding text content, direct access to a content management system (CMS), is the most consistent solution. Being able to directly implement SEO or content changes yourself should be a top priority. Use whatever negotiations are needed to get this type of direct control.In larger organizations, you may have no choice but to rely on developers or designers to implement your marketing changes or content.

I recently spoke with Atlanta search marketer Joe Woods, on marketing bottlenecks and how to overcome these obstacles. In some cases you are depending on a web designer or programmer to implement your SEO changes. If the programmers or designers are already loaded with other tasks, they may not have time to implement SEO work in the current production cycle.

Joe Woods sees a clear solution for these impediments. Joe says,”It’s not that your SEO recommendations are bad, it’s just that they’re not getting implemented. You’ve gotta get buy-in. When you actually go through development cycles, SEO stories get pushed back or not implemented. You’ve got to start getting buy-in on the developer level or web designer level. If you’re in an agile shop, the developers and designers have some bandwidth and some say in choosing to do SEO development stories”.

The regular iteration cycles in agile development may allow you to include developers or designers in your agile stories. This can be effective if you deliver your materials to the developers and designers early in each iteration.

Joe believes that this can be solved where the rubber meets the road, “If you can, get the project manager to see the value and the benefit of the traffic resulting from implementing the SEO story in this release cycle. Sometimes you’ve got to be a sales guy and develop a good relationship with the developers or designers. This may involve buying people lunch or using some informal setting or meeting to teach the value of SEO to the organization.”

The biggest bottleneck can be getting department heads or other executives to allocate budget money or to allocate developer, content writer or web designer hours to implement your SEO marketing changes. This problem can be resolved by presenting a case study or business case that sells the expected benefits of your SEO or search marketing changes. Joe says that sometimes the problem originates at the top of your department, “As an SEO, I shouldn’t have to spend 80 percent of my time getting buy-in. Maybe I should only spend 20 percent of my time, getting buy-in, getting external resources to build links or resources to write blog posts.”

All these problems can be resolved by negotiating specific commitments for developer or designer resources at the beginning of the search marketing project. This requires that your department will allocate specific resource hours that are needed to implement SEO web or blog changes during every production cycle. Negotiating these commitments, up front, with department heads, project managers and designers will guarantee that your search marketing strategies are consistently implemented to build search rankings, web traffic and conversions.

Preventing Search Marketing Campaign Bottlenecks

The Traffic Power of Long Tail Search Keywords

Ed Hill — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:15:34 +0000

So, how can your web site or blog compete with major competitor search listings on the first page of search results? By using the traffic building power of many long tail search keywords.

Natural search keywords fall into two groups, broad keywords and niche long tail keywords. A broad keyword is a one or two word phrase that people enter into a search engine, such as “cars”. A broad keyword will produce millions of search results and many of the search listings on the first page of search results will be the major, established competitors. Major competitors who rank on the first page of search listings may get a huge volume of visitors to that one broad keyword focused web page. Many smaller competitors for the search phrase “cars”, will end up on the fifth page of search results or worse. If your web page doesn’t show on the first page of search results, it might as well be invisible.

Long Tail Search Keywords
A long tail keyword is a search phrase with several words that represents a very specific search, such as “red convertible sports car”. Now imagine that you build many web pages for all the variations of of this search phrase, such “blue convertible sports car”, and many others.
Consider that there are fewer competitors for the long tail search phrases, which makes it easier for your web site to rank first for all the long tail keyword phrases that you target. The long tail keyword strategy states that you can get more web traffic by ranking for hundreds of long tail keyword searches that attract only a few visitors each, than by ranking for one broad keyword phrase like “cars”.

Long tail search phrases are more targeted and are used differently than broad keywords. Broad keywords are often used by a searcher that is still in the beginning stages of the buying cycle. The beginning of the buying cycle is where searchers use broad keyword phrases to learn more about the category. Long tail keyword phrases are used as searchers move from research mode to purchase mode in the buying cycle. Long tail keyword phrases are more likely to produce higher conversions than broad keyword search phrases.

Why would any one target many long tail keyword phrases that only produce a few visitors each month? In a graph of the high traffic from a few broad keywords versus the smaller traffic from many long keyword phrases, the total traffic from the many keyword phrases will tend to be larger than the traffic from a few broad keyword phrases. The term Long Tail usually describes the retail strategy of selling a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each. This retail concept of Long Tail was popularized in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, by writer Chris Anderson, in which he mentioned examples of businesses using this strategy such as Amazon.com and NetFlix.

This concept can also be applied to traffic from natural searches for longer keyword search phrases. The more pages your build for long tail keyword phrases, the lower the competition and the greater your chance for ranking on the first page of search engine result listings. The payoff is many pages that attract more search traffic than a single web page that ranks first for one high traffic search keyword.

The Traffic Power of Long Tail Search Keywords

Marketing Myths – Search Optimizing to Drive All Traffic to the Home Page

Ed Hill — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:15:34 +0000

Working with search marketing clients, I have sometimes encountered a belief that all traffic should be driven to the home page of the web site. Years ago, I would find online business owners who held the belief that users would want to go to the home page and then navigate the site through the menu. While this is not as common as in past years, it is still a dangerous misconception.

I once worked with an education services website that placed almost every product offering on the home page. The result was an unfocused mess on the home page that suffered a low conversion rate and a high bounce rate. Whether your site is a blog or a business website, don’t throw everything on the home page. You can also make this mistake in search optimization for your web site.

Search engine users are very specific in their queries. They are often searching for specific information to answer a question or a very specific product that will meet an immediate need. Each one of your web pages should be the answer to a different customer need or question. Mistakenly trying to answer all web visitor needs on one page, like the home page, is guaranteed to frustrate your web visitors or blog visitors. The result will be confused visitors, who will immediately bounce back to the search engine and click on another web page result.

A similar SEO mistake is to optimize only the home page and a trifling few web pages. Optimization should be applied consistently across the entire web site or blog. The SEO battle is won or lost at the page level, but since only 25-50% of your pages will eventually rank in the first page of search results, optimize many pages to increase the natural search traffic performance of the entire web site.

Start your optimization of the entire web site with the title tag and meta-tags. The title tag is most influential to search engines, whether on the home page or other pages.

The title tag and meta-tags should meet these requirements:
1) Must accurately describe the web page content with a keyword that is sought by a larger number of people each month.
2) The title tag keyword should also appear in the on-page headline to reduce the visitor bounce rate.
3) The title tag must have the same meaning as similar page content words that express the page theme. Since most search engines use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Search queries that use LSI against the indexed web pages will return web page results that are similar in meaning even if the results don’t share a specific keyword.
4) The meta-description tag may use the keyword and should also convey a benefit to the reader. When a reader sees your web page title listed in Google search results, Google often places the description tag text underneath the listing. Here’s your chance to lure in more readers with a compelling description tag.
5) Meta-description tags should be unique for every page.
6) The keyword meta-tag is useless.
7) The meta tag is not discussed much, but tells search engines that among any pages with similar text, that the tagged page is the unique and original page. This is useful because it prevents the dreaded search engine duplicate content penalty.

Use these fundamental steps across 30-100 of your most important web pages, and you will build a powerful foundation for attracting web traffic through natural search results.

Marketing Myths – Search Optimizing to Drive All Traffic to the Home Page

SEO Myths: Does Google Consider SEO to be Spam?

Ed Hill — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:15:43 +0000

One of the myths of SEO is that search enhanced pages will hurt the user experience. We have all seen examples of poorly written, overly optimized web pages that deliver a clumsy user experience. The obvious example is pages with big clumsy keywords in every sentence on the page. These web pages just feel wrong to the reader.

Keyword stuffed pages stem from the myth that higher keyword density on the page leads to higher rankings. Other ancient web spam tricks like stuffing hundreds of keywords into HTML meta tags or placing hundreds of invisible keywords on the page in the same color as the background, were disallowed by the search engines prior to 1999. More sophisticated tricks such as paid links, have very publicly failed throughout 2010 and 2011. As a search marketer, I still encounter people who have a vague notion that SEO still involves such simplistic tricks, or that SEO will hurt the user experience.

SEO helps the user experience. Here’s how search optimization helps search engines to see and present your web pages clearly:

Meaningful, keyword focused page titles help search engines to accurately index the content of each web page
Elimination of technical errors ensures that everything on the web site just works as expected
Technical SEO eliminates duplicate content that wastes the user’s time
Compensating for certain web technologies such as Flash, JavaScript or AJAX, allows search engines to index content
Optimization prevents content management systems from blocking search engine indexing
SEO enhances video and image content so that it can be search-indexed and easily found by users through keyword focused titles

Here are some reasons why SEO actually benefits the user experience:

Elimination of broken internal links prevents user disappointment
The easy to use, keyword focused global navigation helps users quickly find the right content
Social media inclusion of web pages exposes your content to users who share content, ultimately gaining natural links
Acquiring links from relevant sites will provide related information to the web user
Ensuring that content links internally to relevant pages, helps the user find added information
Content gap analysis ensures that your site addresses subject matter relevant to user needs, as revealed by user profiles or web personas
SEO ensures that outdated pages properly redirect to new pages
Optimized press releases use appropriate keywords so industry journalists can find your content
SEO reduces page load speed, to deliver information to the user quickly

Over the last 8 years, I’ve studied the Google webmaster guidelines constantly as they are updated and practiced a lot of copy writing, so that I can create or enhance existing pages that will read in a natural way for the user. I try to be very conscious about this seo copywriting issue. My goal is to make the most accurate title tag, headline, links and content text that correctly describe the content of the web page. This helps the search engines to accurately index my web pages. It also helps users to find my web pages that meet their information needs.

The Google guidelines are explicit in requiring that the user experience is placed first. Matt Cutts, head of the Google’s spam fighting team, has gone on record to say that Google does not consider SEO to be spam. In a 2011 video, Matt Cutts added that SEO is “a valid way to help people find what they’re looking for via search engines.” But in general, Google does not consider SEO to be spam.

I have always sought to practice copy writing where, the user experience must always come first. In my past SEO projects, for major retail web sites, analytics data typically showed that bounce rate decreased by 10-20%, and time on page increased for search enhanced web pages.

SEO Myths: Does Google Consider SEO to be Spam?

How to Promote your Blog Posts for More Traffic

Ed Hill — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:15:48 +0000

How can you steadily build traffic and readership for your blog?

You wish you could get here!

If you are a devoted blogger, who posts on a regular (weekly or daily) basis, then you’ve already taken the first step to promote your blog posts for more traffic. Posting regularly is a crucial step in getting your readers to return. How can you expose your posts to a large circle of new readers and grow your audience?

Focus on topics your audience will want to share based on the social media and keyword research that we’ve discussed previously. Next use a variety of proven blog post formats that attract people who like to share links on the interenet. Here are some blog post types that people like to share:

List articles such as the Ten Best or the Ten Worst of anything
Video demonstrations of how things work or how to make things
Video interviews
How to do it articles
Photos of people and activities from club events, seminars or presentations
Interviews with experts in your field
Infographics that share fascinating or little known facts

Once you’ve created your blog posts you want to make sure that they are spread by blog readers to the widest audience. This part is crucial.

In any group of followers or friends on social networks and social bookmark sites, there are people who read and there are people who share links and content. Take the time to read recent posts for the last week from your contacts on Facebook, Google+, Twitter or forums. Among all your friends, locate the ones who post the most often. These super linkers are your key to future traffic. Once you locate these super linkers, take the time to start sharing there blog posts or favorite links. Occasionally, you can ask them to share your better blog posts.

Next find forums that cover the same specialized topic that your blog covers. With a little use of search engines you can rapidly locate forums that cover almost any topic. Take the time to join these forums and participate in other conversations. Occasionally it will be appropriate for you to reference one of your own blog posts that addresses a popular topic in the forum. Be careful in how often you post links to your blog posts. Some forums don’t allow this practice. However, if your blog post contributes something to the discussion, it can be appropriate to share a link to your own blog or another blog. This can really be useful to other forum readers if your blog post solves a problem or explains something complicated.

You can also use this method of sharing blog posts that agree with or disagree with some one else in a blog, on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+. If your blog posts regularly feature photos, infographics or images, you may want to post blog updates to Pinterest, Tumblr or Ffffound.

Remember:

Create new blog posts on a reliable schedule that brings readers back every few days
Post in blog post formats that people like to share
Feed your new blog posts to social contacts who like to share content
Link to your new blog posts through your social networks

How to Promote your Blog Posts for More Traffic